Recently in reading glasses Category

(On the administrative side, I'm changing comment authentication on this blog. I can't deal with the thousands of spam comments anymore.)

I recently wrapped up Slip Point and have sent it sailing off into submission land. I sat on what I thought was a mostly-complete draft of this one for an entire year (I actually ended up adding 40% more in word count from that point, but conceptually the major bones were in place). So there's a bit of that dusting-off-hands feeling in having really finished this one. Why was I stuck for so long? Because it was originally envisioned as space opera — not my typical fare.

My brother, who often deals with literary science fiction but rarely romance (pretty much only when I force him to read my work), handed me Star Hero, a guide for RPG gamemasters who want to set up a science fiction campaign. It helped to have common options laid out in an organized manner for exactly the purpose I intended: world-building. This is instinctual for me with fantasy, but I needed the extra help outside of my usual genre. One hopes that with practice, this shall improve.

Secondary props go to TV Tropes for confirming when I should mock an aspect of my setting.

My latest romance read: Bound and Determined by Jane Davitt and Alexa Snow. I was warned about the sado-masochism aspects of this, but found it far more focused on the psychology behind becoming a submissive. I can't begin to say how much I appreciated the way characters talked things out and had families and friends; and the writing is good, smooth and easy without ever being drab or stealing the show. The arc felt a little oddly shaped to me, perhaps because of its length, but it's a worthwhile BSDM m/m read.

And I should belatedly mention that the Deviant Divas ran a spotlight feature on me. For someone without a particularly interesting life, I have too much fun coming up with different bios everytime I'm asked for one.

I confess that I resisted this series for the longest time. I kept hearing about it, picking it up, reading the first paragraph or two, then returning it to the shelf. The opening — a vampire attack on a London spinster who has temporarily retreated from the public spaces of a ball, foiled by preternatural ability and a parasol — was trying too hard to be funny, I thought.

But the heroine of our tale grew on me. Brisk, practical to a fault, and scholarly to boot, Alexia Tarabotti suffers under the double curse of being soulless — terribly unfashionable — and half-Italian, and of course has been shelved as unmarriageable. But her ability to neutralize supernatural creatures such as vampires and werewolves at a touch makes her useful to the Bureau of Unnatural Registry, which is investigating rogue vampires (they must adhere carefully to their proper place in society, of course) and then makes her a person of interest to some truly horrific creatures indeed. One scene left me flinching from how convincingly creepy it was rendered.

And then I started liking the gruff, literally alpha hero (he's the leader of the local werewolf pack), and rooting on their unexpectedly passionate encounters (there's a line about Alexia's abilities and werewolf tendencies at the full moon that made me shiver). One plot turn here did disappointment me as trite, but I'm still impressed that the author handled humor (she did eventually succeed in making me laugh), suspense, and romance in the same book as well as she did.

The presence of dirigibles and some clever carriages with water boiling capabilities make this nominally steampunk, but I'd slot this one under "fantasy of manners." The writing's a bit direct in style — short, forthright sentences like "Alexia was confused" — but I think that the characters and story make this one an enjoyable read nonetheless.

This is a rant. These are my personal tastes, of course, but I've been actively annoyed by each of these points at some ebookstore or another.

• If you have dozens of books in a category, think about ordering them in reverse chronological order of publish date. That way, people who visit intermittently will first see the new books they haven't seen before. Ordering by the author's last name strikes me as senseless — the A names will always come first, and if I know an author's name, I'm going to search for it. (Unless, I suppose, I have the spelling wrong.)

• Treat your categories as labels, not folders. I automatically click over to the fantasy genre, only to realize that I should've gone into the "Romance" > "Fantasy" categories. Why not put a book under both?

• Figure out how to offer advanced search with multiple parameters. Please. Especially when your categories are not mutually exclusive (like "Fantasy" and "Erotic"). And let me use exclusionary criteria.

• I'm not convinced by different imprints for different genres. I rarely see the imprints marketed separately, in which case it just makes it harder for me to find my favored genre when it's under some other name.

• In the confirmation page, tell me how to actually get my book — preferably with a direct link. Don't make me go to my order history page as a wild guess after staring forlornly at the "We took your money! Thanks!" page or make me go refresh my inbox a few dozen times when the receipt email with instructions takes its time arriving.

• Associate the print and electronic editions of a book so that I can visit the same book page to get either. Including the format in the title — especially within the same quotation marks you use to indicate the title, which I'm also dubious about — is awkward, especially when I encounter the same title a little further down for its ebook edition. And add a filtering capability so folks can see both or just one format.

• Okay, I'll add this as a separate point. Don't use quotation marks to mark titles. This is a web page. Please find some other way to format or indicate titles.

• Include titles of your books in text. Covers, when rendered at thumbnail size, don't always show the title clearly. (This is something I always look for when I'm asked my opinion of my covers.)

• If you do include both cover images and text titles, but display your books in a grid format without sufficient spacing between rows, it actually takes me a moment to register which cover the title matches — the one above or the one below?

• Have a cart system. Don't force me to immediately buy a book if I'm interested in it; I like to gather them together and mull over them before I hand over my credit card. Also, pre-paying for credits sucks.

• Author pages add a nice, personal touch, and also let you raid the backlist of a writer you've just discovered, but who's been around for a while.

• "Coming soon" pages help build anticipation. Pre-ordering capability will get you sales on books I guarantee I'll forget about otherwise.

• Indicate the length.

• Make it easy for me to be able to read an excerpt. This includes formatting it properly so I can actually distinguish paragraphs.

• Choice of multiple formats — so I can get it in, say, both PDF and EPUB — is a marvelous thing.

• And, of course, no DRM.

I'm sure other readers have different issues with ebookstores.

Sharon Shinn is a go-to for romantic fantasy (at least in her adult works). Her works are solid fantasy or sf stories on their own, but they're always entwined with a strong romantic thread. Her first book, the spare, haunting Shape-Changer's Wife — about a mage's fascination with the woman of the title — was what originally drew me to her writing, although most readers are probably more familiar with her Samaria trilogy.

She's written in a number of other worlds since then, sometimes in series and sometimes in standalone novels, and it was a delight to discover Quatrain, four novellas that revisit four previously used settings: those of Archangel, Heart of Gold, Summers at Castle Auburn, and Mystic and Rider.

I particularly enjoyed Blood, which is nothing macabre but a lovely exploration of family ties and friendship. The hero is Kerk, a gulden man without a father, which normally would cast him adrift in society, but he's been taken in by his stepmother's husband and found a respectable place for himself. He rather reminded me of a Modesitt hero: courteous, careful, determined, honorable. He wins you over even from the camp that prefers bad boys.

More color is introduced when he meets Jalci, a spirited young indigo woman who grows curious about why Kerk is in the impoverished neighborhood of the city. She peppers him with questions, then decides to help him when she learns he's trying to find his mother. Their interactions switch between the gulden and indigo languages, depending on how formally or casually they're trying to speak. These dialogues were a joy for me to read, full of both cultural and personal meaning, and rendered rather deftly via English syntax. The stiffer gulden language isn't necessarily flagged as bad, either; at one point Kerk is describing his stepmother, and only the gulden language offers sufficient praise and respect in the right tenor.

Their relationship develops from initial hostility to regular meetings in new restaurants in the city; as different as they and their backgrounds are, they complement each other rather well. No crazy rescues or protective stances, just a true partnership forming. As much as the passionate lust-at-first-sight trope rules in romance circles, the slow unfolding of true intimacy that Shinn draws here is wonderful to witness.

Circumstances are arranged a bit too neatly to provide any significant barriers or drama, but this was deeply enjoyable nonetheless because the characters were vibrant and captivated me just by being likable people. I'd recommend this one even to folks who haven't read Heart of Gold.

I know that writers write, but I've been spending long hours in the office — staying till midnight on one occasion this week, and likely doing more work tomorrow. When I come home, do I immediately start whipping out my daily quota of words? No. I value my sleep and sanity. When I do have a few spare moments to breathe, I end up reading instead. Some recently discovered gems:

Barbara Hambly has been writing short stories with characters from various novels, in what's called The Further Adventures of... It's always unexpectedly pleasing to find an author work deftly in both the long and short forms, and to discover that her voice rings true and clear with or without professional edits. I have a ridiculous soft spot in my heart for Mother of Winter, and "Pretty Polly" wasn't a disappointment at all even after that awesome novel. In fact, it pulled off the same feat of a mystery that I got, one that just made perfect sense to me without any gimmicks. And I love characters who are realistically practical, as Hambly's tend to be. If you liked Gil, I think you'll like this.

Similarly, Victoria Janssen impressed me with the solid historical setting and non-florid eroticism of Moonlight Mistress. I read one review that complained of its disjointedness, of its trying too hard to be a historical war novel, a romance, a werewolf story, all in one — and I see where that reader was coming from, but I was overall won over by it all. There are no crazy pack dominance or mating rituals with the werewolves, as most paranormal werewolf novels get into. Janssen instead finds natural situations of attraction and opens them to the surface. And these situations are varied, free of over-set drama, and not shoehorned into the plot. I wouldn't call this a romance, exactly, but I think warmly of all the characters and how they get entangled with each other. I'm a little sad not to be able to categorize this one better, even though part of what I liked was its willingness to slide around traditional genre boundaries, because it means it'll be hard to find more in this vein.

I won this in a contest — along with some other goodies that I completely forgot about, because all I really cared about was this book.

I'm a fan of Howson's writing, as she subscribes to the lyrical school of style. The worldbuilding in this one caught at me as well. Forget the wolves and cats who abound in paranormals. This is a fantasy romance where you have a gargoyle-shifter and a woman who can change into lava.

The story begins with Aera (the latter) making her way into the labyrinth where she kills criminals in the name of the god — a holy executioner, if you will. And if you doubt that she'd do this, consider that her family had sunk into the lowest of castes because they hadn't produced anyone with a fire-gift for a century. When Aera discovered her gift by burning down their house, this was the reaction:

Her walk also takes her down the path of memory, and she thinks of Coram, the boy who had accepted her in the days of her family's disgrace, and whom she never saw again after she was taken away to the temple for training. And at the end of the walk, of course, is Coram, now a man. He meets her demand to rise and face his death because she's come in the name of the god with, "To kill me. Yes, of course. Then I think I'll not stand, if it's all the same to you."

Howson describes past events with a deft hand, and I never questioned Aera's affection for Coram, or the hardship her family suffered. And I liked Aera. She's not the wishy-washy sort, but someone who honestly examines her beliefs. She also doesn't wait around, languishing for rescue when she's in trouble, but works to get herself out.

My only disappointment was the scope. There aren't any secondary characters, and the bad guys were fanatical and jealous of their power to the point of being generically evil. There were some beautiful details, like stone pillars where priestesses leave the imprint of their hands, but the world outside the labyrinth was left hazy, despite teasing mentions of maenads who hunt runaways in the desert and rumors of northern lands where all gifts are accepted. There was so much more that could have been done with this setting! Instead, everything centers around the lovers: their anger and despair and tenderness. Which, you might argue, is the way it's supposed to be in a shorter romance.

It's a warming tale rather than a passionate one, but that's what I like about it — it takes the time to go through the characters' emotions beyond some blazing, relentless love/lust/angst, and leaves you quietly content.

So I went and read a humorous holiday-themed sf m/m short story, Angela Benedetti's "The Joy of Exchanging Gifts." This is not an intersection of categories that I normally look for, and yet I thoroughly enjoyed it. It involved anthropology and sex in quite possibly the most awkward position I can imagine, and somehow that was a winning combination for me. It was rather like the time I read my first mystery novel after years of reading only fantasy, sf, and English class assignments: I got all excited not just by the story itself, but by the door opening, the realization that there's this entire world out there that I never looked at before, and now I get to go romp in it.

I think I need to stop hitting the fantasy category first thing at various publishers' sites, and be more open-minded. Even if a certain genre makes me feel wearier than that guy who went trooping 500 miles and then 500 more, there's always the chance that some wonderful author has gone and made it fresh again. After all, genres are only single-dimensional labels that can't capture some of the aspects that appeal most to me about a book — a type of character, a plot button, or, most importantly, the quality of writing.

Ever since I've been trying to get the hang of this romance stuff, I think I've been studying it more closely in all the books I read, even the non-romances. Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar trilogy, usually a comfort read, annoyed me because there's a lifebond that conveniently keeps a couple from having to actually learn about and court each other. (Although of course they still suffer plenty of angst, somewhow.) Then Shannon Hale's River Secrets carried on with a romance from the previous book that had seemed resolved, even though those characters were now secondary, and I wondered if this was breaking romance rules — but of course it wasn't a romance.

And Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn, while it drew me in with the main character's voice and the postapocalyptic worldbuilding, had a decent guy who started out a bit antagonistic. Ah ha, I thought right off. He's going to be her love interest.

I'm now engaged in a mad search for the rest of the books in the Obernewtyn Chronicles — not to find out if I'm right, but because it's good stuff. But I'll probably raise my arms Steve Holt-style and shout, "I knew it!" if I am right, even if I'm in public. Perhaps this should be strictly indoors reading.

There are times I think I'm doomed as a romance writer, because the love stories that hit me the hardest tend to be ones that don't end happily. I just reread "Sorrel's Heart" by Susan Palwick, and I doubt many people would classify it as romance. But it was as a love story that it struck me.

In a world where people are divided into normals and freaks with twisted bodies, two freaks meet: Sorrel, a girl with a heart that's attached on the outside of her body, and Quartz, a man who enjoys inflicting pain. Sorrel's condition is literal and figurative; she feels emotions more intensely, because her heart is so exposed.

They begin as practical companions and end up as lovers. There's no elegant courtship, but I never doubted the intensity of their bond. And the story is about how Sorrel's presence in Quartz's life changes him — one of the ultimate ambitions of women in relationships, it seems.

Not an appropriate read for a morose day, but striking and beautiful, despite — because of — the twisted characters.

I find myself annoyed by short chapters. This may stem from my childhood, when my mother would find me reading past my bedtime and I would beg for an extension "just till the chapter ends" and then the chapter would end on the next page.

But it's incredibly disruptive to me when the last sentence of a chapter immediately hooks up to the first sentence of the next chapter, repeatedly. I understand the use of chapter breaks for occasional suspenseful pauses, but in the current book I'm reading, I've grown tired of dialogue being cut into parts by a chapter break.

L.E. Modesitt had astoundingly short chapters in some of his Recluse books — less than a page, at times — but I remember him using them as scenes more than chapters. There would be a change of perspective or setting whenever the next roman numeral popped up.

I would go re-read The Towers of the Sunset (Creslin was on what I labeled my "D" list, for "delectable"), except I think it's undergoing anti-silverfish treatment, between the peas and carrots and the cinnamon bread. A pity — how many stories do you know where the hero skis away from his arranged marriage?